Plover
Clean and truss. Season with salt and pepper. Rub well with butter; place in a pan and cook in a quick oven. Toast some bread, and when the birds are nearly done, place a piece of toast under each bird. Baste well with butter. Serve each bird on a piece of toast.
This one is a reading text rather than a cooking text. Plover cannot legally be obtained or eaten in the United States, and the same is true across most of Europe.
- The birds are protectedAll plovers native to North America are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes it unlawful to take, possess, sell or serve them. There is no open season and no permit available to a home cook.
- Golden plover in particularThe American golden plover was among the plovers sold on market stalls in this period, shot in very large numbers on migration. Its decline is one of the cases usually cited among those that drove protective legislation, and it has not been a legal game bird in the United States for many decades.
- Britain and EuropeGolden plover retains some limited quarry status in parts of the UK, but lapwing and other plovers are fully protected, and sale of wild-taken birds is restricted. Anyone abroad should check current national law rather than assume a game dealer's word.
- No substitution is offered hereSmall game birds differ so much in fat, size and doneness convention that transposing this method onto quail or snipe is guesswork. Use a current recipe written for the bird you actually have.
- Why the toast is under the birdSmall waders were roasted briefly and the toast was there to catch the fat and juices. With snipe and similar birds the related practice was to leave them undrawn so that the trail ran into the toast, which was regarded as the best part; that handling is not something to reproduce. This recipe, though, says to clean the bird.
- The vagueness is not carelessnessNo temperature, no weight, no count of birds, no time. The book assumes a cook who already knew how small birds were handled in a fierce oven. Modern readers have no such shared frame to fall back on.
Plover was ordinary market game in the second half of the nineteenth century, sold by the dozen alongside snipe, rail and reed-birds, and the golden plover was prized enough to be shot commercially on migration along the Atlantic coast. The treatment here — trussed whole, buttered, roasted in a hot oven, set on toast to catch the drippings — is the standard English handling of any small wader, and it appears in American household books because such birds were cheap and plentiful. Market gunning of this kind was progressively outlawed, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended commercial traffic in wild birds in the United States, after which pages like this one became historical curiosities. They are useful chiefly as a record of how much wild protein once passed through an ordinary kitchen.